(Thu., Aug. 23, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)

It may not enjoy the notoriety of his previous Titicut Follies (whose release was blocked for years due to its candid portrait of life inside a Massachusetts mental institution), but Frederick Wiseman’s 1969 High School stirred up controversy of its own, particularly in the Philadelphia area — not surprising, since it was shot at Northeast High. In the last three decades, Wiseman has established himself as one of America’s most venerable documentarians, most regularly applying himself to non-narrative overviews of social institutions and communities. The expansive focus (i.e., long running times) of such recent films as Public Housing and Belfast, Maine has largely relegated them to PBS viewing, but the Prince’s screening offers an extremely rare chance to see Wiseman on the big screen. (The film will also air as part of P.O.V. on WHYY-TV 12 on Tue., Aug. 28, at 9 p.m. and Fri., Aug. 31, at 10 p.m.) High School ruffled feathers with its view of secondary education as a place where children are indoctrinated into conformity. (Wiseman returns almost obsessively to shots of gym-class calisthenics, where girls’ bodies bob up and down in dehumanized unison.) While one starry-eyed young teacher makes a go at instructing her class in the finer points of "the poet Paul Simon" (the context makes "Dangling Conversation" seem even more absurd), a brush-cut dean of discipline instructs one strong-willed student to accept detention even though he denies that he’s done anything wrong. "We are out to establish that you are a man and that you can take orders," he explains. Given the film’s time frame, it’s hard not to see the disciplinarians’ line-holding as a bulwark against the nation’s social upheaval, a last chance to turn out new members of the Silent Majority. But there’s plenty that hasn’t changed as well, even if these days the starry-eyed teacher has a pierced eyebrow and schools her students in the finer points of "the poet Ja Rule."

War Zone

While Maggie Hadleigh-West’s documentary starts from a commendable place, it quickly gels into an unappetizing blend of self-righteous finger-pointing and counterproductive ambush journalism. Setting out to make a film on the subject of "street abuse," Hadleigh-West hit upon the idea of toting around a handheld video camera and turning it on the men who whistle, jeer and otherwise accost her. Unfortunately, the result is what you usually get when you stick a camera into someone’s face: a lot of inarticulate jabbering, some half-hearted explanations and a few smacks at the lens. Traveling to several cities around the U.S., Hadleigh-West perfects her spin-and-shoot technique with such piercing questions as "Why were you looking at my breasts?" and "Do you realize what you’re doing is degrading to women?" (The second rarely gets answered, while the first usually draws a response along the lines of "’Cause you fine, baby!") The film also includes interviews with other women on their own street-abuse experiences, all of whom make their cases better than the filmmaker herself; particularly interesting is a mother-daughter argument where the former recalls having met her boyfriend of 16 years on the street, and the latter describes how she and her girlfriend are regularly accosted. (The talk breaks down when the daughter declines to talk about her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend; it’s hard to tell if she’s suggesting sexual abuse, or if at that point the atmosphere’s so poisoned that you can’t think of anything else.) Particularly problematic is the way Hadleigh-West blurs the line between street abuse and sexual assault, coming dangerously close to equating the one with the other. Closing the film with a 911 call from a woman who’s just about to be raped may be an attention-grabber, but if her assault had anything to do with a man who whistled at her on the street, we’re not told anything about it. In fact, it seems like Hadleigh-West has stolen another women’s pain to make her own point, which seems abusive in its own right. Because she’s not interested in doing more than confronting them, Hadleigh-West never bothers to examine the self-evident facts about her catcalling subjects — that most are non-white, and many seem to be working class or unemployed. There’s no excuse for disempowered men rebuilding their masculinity by pushing women down, but a simple understanding of their situation would go a lot further toward changing the state of things than anything in Hadleigh-West’s film.

Safe

When I first saw Todd Haynes’ brilliant Safe back in 1995, I promised myself I’d never watch it on the small screen. Haynes’ cavernous, Kubrickian compositions derive much of their power from sheer scale; while in a theater a tiny figure in the corner of a massive landscape might seem tragically disconnected, the same image on a TV set comes across as merely distracting, a human being reduced to a few dozen pixels in height. That said, though, watching Safe at home is still a chilling experience, the strength of Haynes’ carefully planned mise-en-scène and Julianne Moore’s performance far outweighing the drop in scale. Moore, who says in the audio commentary that she consciously tried to disassociate her character’s voice from her body, plays Carol White, a privileged San Fernando housewife who suddenly becomes allergic to her life. Devoted to aerobics, drug- and alcohol-free — "I’m just a total milkaholic, really," — Carol suddenly begins coughing at the slightest hint of fumes in the air, breaking out in rashes and getting nosebleeds at the beauty salon. Before long, she’s sleeping in a colorless room and wearing an air-filter mask to the dry cleaners, but even that’s not enough to satisfy her deteriorating immune system, and she ends up at a New Age enclave called Wrenwood run by a snaky self-help guru (Peter Friedman). (In the movie’s wickedest line, one enraptured co-worker coos, "He’s a chemically sensitive man with AIDS, so his perspective is incredibly vast.") Haynes, who made his reputation as a vanguard of the New Queer Cinema with the Genet-inspired Poison, surprised many by taking on a follow-up project without any explicitly gay characters. On the commentary track (shared with Moore and producer Christine Vachon), Haynes recalls how when Safe was screened at the 1995 Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the audience erupted in relieved laughter when Poison’s James Lyons shows up in a tiny role as a cab driver; finally, he implies, they knew what to think of the film. (The metaphorical import of Carol’s illness is clear as day, but Haynes deliberately excludes all but the most passing references to AIDS; in one scene, Carol and her friend practically trip over themselves to avoid mentioning it.) Both a sly satire and an insidious modern horror film, Safe is frighteningly adept at getting into your system, preying on anxieties you might not even know you had. Haynes, Vachon and Moore all reflect on how the film in some ways marks the end of an era, one where visually inventive, stylized, risky films could be made for under a million dollars and still get major distribution. "That world is gone," Moore reflects of the independent cinema of the ’80s and ’90s. If so, you couldn’t ask for a better swan song.

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